CRIMINALS AS HEROES: LINKING SYMBOL TO STRUCTURE

This article examines the phenomenon of the heroic criminal and describes the structural preconditions necessary for his appearance. The author argues that these lawbreakers are best understood as cultural products that represent a concept of extra-legal justice. Their criminality, at least initially, is imputed with political meaning. Such symbols emerge when the rational, formal, bureaucratic justice of the state fails to reflect popular conceptions of justice. These symbolic figures are endemic in any culturally complex state society, although usually their appeal is to a small and relatively powerless public. But at times when the perception of law as unjust is widespread, the heroic criminal may emerge as a national figure of epic proportions. At such times a virtual epidemic of such figures may appear since entrepreneurs, motivated by either politics or profit, “market” such symbols to a receptive public. Using comparative analysis, the author presents briefcase studies of Jesse James, William Bonney (Billy the Kid), John Dillinger, and Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd to demonstrate how they became legendary figures. The author then describes more contemporary symbols of extra-legal justice and the structural factors that inspired their heroic image.     

Estimating Probabilities Relevant to Calculating Relative Risk-Corrected Returns of Alternative Portfolios

In making all-or-none choices between alternative securities, Samuelson (1997b) suggested that investors of different risk-aversion should calculate from past samples of those securities their relevant Harmonic Means, or Geometric means, or other associative means representative of their respective degrees of relative-risk-aversion. Here it is shown how this learning procedure can be improved upon when you have prior knowledge that the securities have log-Normal distributions. Classical estimation theory, concerning consistent, efficient, and sufficient statistics, is shown to have a cash value by means of the calculable measure of (ex ante) “risk-corrected certainty equivalents.” Needed qualifications and testings are also presented.     

PROBLEMS WITH BINOMIAL TWO-SIDED TESTS AND THE ASSOCIATED CONFIDENCE INTERVALS

Confidence intervals for parameters of distributions with discrete sample spaces will be less conservative (i.e. have smaller coverage probabilities that are closer to the nominal level) when defined by inverting a test that does not require equal probability in each tail. However, the P‐value obtained from such tests can exhibit undesirable properties, which in turn result in undesirable properties in the associated confidence intervals. We illustrate these difficulties using P‐values for binomial proportions and the difference between binomial proportions.     

Some Issues of Particular Concern to Sociologists As Academic Administrators

As a sociologist who has served in deanships and other university administrative positions in the past 15 years, the author has been particularly concerned with race/class/gender issues in academia. This paper identified some of the issues and discussed the relevance of sociological training in addressing them.     

Ethical dilemmas in evaluating programs with family court related clients

Two ethical dilemmas are discussed; breaching client confidentiality in order to intervene in the client's illegal behavior, and defining the role of evaluator as expert witness. The evaluation context concerns a combined program development and evaluation project with clients involved in family court proceedings for child abuse or neglect. Different perspectives, approaches, and experiences in resolving each dilemma are reviewed. The conclusion argues that approaches to ethical dilemmas in evaluation projects must go beyond techniques to disguise data, to include an assessment of the values and value commitments connected to the different roles an evaluator must perform.